The content of this post has been moved to here.

Below is the table of contents of my forthcoming book Human Transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives.

The book will be released by Island Press in November or December 2011.  For more or to preorder, see Island Press or Amazon, or my hometown favorite, Powell’s.

Human Transit
Jarrett Walker
Island Press, 2011.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The complete introduction is available online here.

1.  What Transit is, and Does

This chapter defines transit and its role in the city compared to other transport modes, and proposes the concept of personal mobility, a measurable freedom, as transit’s most fundamental product.

2.  What Makes Transit Useful?  Seven Demands and How Transit Serves Them

A customer’s expectations of transit can be boiled down to seven demands:

1. It takes me where I want to go.
2. It takes me when I want to go.
3. It’s a good use of my time.
4. It’s a good use of my money.
5. It respects me.
6. I can trust it.
7. It gives me freedom to change my plans.

This chapter defines the main elements of the transit product (speed, frequency, span, reliability, etc.) and explains how each serves those various demands.

3.  Five Paths to Confusion

An introduction to five of the most common conceptual mistakes in transit planning: map-reading errors, motorist’s errors, box errors, polarization errors, and choosing words with unfortunate connotations.

4.  Lines, Loops, and Longing

The most basic geometric concepts in transit.  Should transit lines be I-shaped or U-shaped?  And why do people get so excited about loops?

5.  Touching the City: Stops and Stations

How far apart should transit stops be?   This chapter explores why this technical-sounding question is fundamental to almost everything you care about.

6.  Peak or All Day?

Does your transit agency’s thinking begin with the peak commute, or with an all-day pattern of service?  Why this matters.

7.  Frequency is Freedom

Frequency is oddly invisible to the non-rider, yet it’s sits at the core of almost all transit outcomes.  This chapter explores the urgent challenge of making frequency visible, in marketing, planning, and policy making.

8.  The Obstacle Course: Speed, Delay, and Reliability

Transit speed is mostly the absence of delay.  This chapter surveys the delay types, explains how planners address them, and how we might think more clearly about them in making policy.

9.  Density Distractions

This chapter confonts recent claims that development density is not as important to transit as we thought, and sorts through some of the confusing ways density can be measured.  Transit can do good work at many density levels, but density — properly measured — is still fundamental to transit outcomes.

10.  Ridership or Coverage:  The Challenge of Service Allocation

Every city or region has some areas where transit demand is high and others where it’s lower.  How can transit agencies reach consensus on how to apportion service among these areas?

11.  Can Fares be Fair?

An exploration of the hard choices around fares, and how smartcards are resolving some but heightening others.  Can fares be “fair”?  Are you sure you want them to be?

12.  Connections or Complexity?

Nobody likes to get off one transit vehicle and get on another — an act known as transferring, changing, or connecting.  This chapter explains why connections are inseparable from many other things we value, including frequency and simplicity.

13.  From Connections to Networks, to Places

If we accept the need for connections (also called transfers), what does this mean for design?  This chapter explores the common types of network structure that arise from this problem, and then considers how connection points can galvanize great urban places.

14.  Be on the Way!  Transit Implications of Location Choice

Whenever you choose a location, such as for your home or business, you largely determine what transit can do for you.  When cities and developers decide where to build things, they profoundly impact the potential for transit in the city as a whole.  This chapter explores how to make these decisions more consciously, as individuals, organizations, governments, and developers.  The physical layout of a community or region is an overwhelming factor in determining how relevant transit can be, so in that sense, this is the most important chapter in the book.

15.  On the Boulevard

The car-oriented suburban boulevard has much more transit potential than it seems.  This chapter explores the special role transit can play in healing the most troublesome features of fast boulevards, and re-creating them as humane and functional places.  The chapter ends with a vision of North America’s most boulevard-based city, Los Angeles, in a future when walking, cycling, and transit all have adequate space alongside the private car.  It’s a nice place, and one where you can be sure of getting to a meeting on time.

16.  Take the Long View

Clearly, the total planning problem requires synthesizing land planning and transport planning, including transit.  It’s pointless to try to tear down the walls that separate these professions from each other, because each has unique expertise that must be valued.  Instead, the key is to create clear conversations at the points where the professions intersect, and for each to provide just the right tools to support and inform the other’s work.

Epilogue: Geometry, Choices, Freedom

A summation of the book’s key themes.

The book is due out from Island Press in about two months.

The complete introduction is now online here.

The Island Press listing is here, and you can also preorder through Amazon.  You can also order it from my hometown favorite, Powell’s, but be sure to chide them for filing it in the “Automotive” section.

Questions about the book Human Transit will be discussed here.

The last major post may have been garbled in your reader output.  The ungarbled version is here.

Among the moronic features of the TypePad platform is a bias against long comments.  Please be clear:

        I value long comments, but am in the grips of a mindless machine that doesn’t.

The problem appears to arise if you’ve been typing in the comment window for a while.  TypePad somehow decides that you’re “idle,” and when you post it rejects the comment, often with a perplexing message such as “we cannot accept this data.”

The workaround appears to be:  Copy your comment.  Open a new browser window.  Navigate back to the post and to a new comment box.  Paste your comment.  Submit.

I know, it’s maddening.  Let me know if you find a nonmaddening blogging platform. 

The last post was garbled on email-based readers. Please see the ungarbled one here.

What’s wrong with the word transfer as used in public transit?  See my article here.

The terms “flexible route” or “demand-responsive” transit or “Dial-a-Ride” refer to services that can vary their routing in real time according to the demands of customers.  These routes are the subject of a vast area of research and practice, summarized here.

“Flexible” is a tricky word, because it may appear in transit contexts with several meanings.  For example, you may hear that “buses are flexible, compared to rail” because it’s easier to change a bus line than a rail line.  That’s a different meaning.  Flexible route means a routing that changes in real time based on what a customer wants right then.  On a flexible route, the 6:00 trip may go this way, while the 7:00 trip goes that way, simply because someone requested it to.  Flexible service responds to some kind of customer communication, usually a request send by phone, text, or internet.  In some cases, regular customers have “standing reservations” to travel at a particular day and time every week.  In some cases, you can also board a flexible bus at an interchange (also called a transfer point) and state your destination to the driver, who plots a course spontaneously.  

Those descriptions make flexible services sound like taxi services, and indeed, flexible routes are intermediate between taxi services and fixed routes.  The difference from taxis is that flexible services may still require you to share the vehicle with others, and make intermediate stops based on their needs.  (If you never ride transit you may still have encountered airport shuttle systems that work on a flexible-route principle.)  This shared-ride feature is why flexible routes count as public transit in the developed world, while typical taxi services don’t.  (Caution: taxi vehicles and drivers may sometimes be hired to provide flexible services, but in this comparision I’m referring to the typical taxi operation that serves one customer or party at a time.)

There are, broadly speaking, two reasons to run flexible rather than fixed service:

• Individual Needs.  For reasons of disability, some customers need a service that pulls into the driveway and assists them in boarding and alighting.  In the US, these services are called paratransit and must be funded by the transit agency.  They are usually run with small vans and are inevitably flexible.
• Efficiently Serving Sparse Demand.  There are a few places where a flexible service will serve demand more efficiently (in terms of service cost) than a fixed route. 

The first reason will continue to drive the need for flexible services geared toward disability and other special needs.  The second reason is more specialised than it looks.

The most important thing you need to know about flexible service is this:  Cost-effectiveness of public transit lies in how many people can travel on the same vehicle with the same driver.  The ratio of passengers to drivers is the most fundamental measure of effectiveness because transit operating costs are dominated by driver labor.  In North America, for example, we talk about productivity as passengers carried per revenue hour — where “revenue hour” means “one vehicle operating with one driver for an hour.”  If you care about transit that serves lots of people at a reasonable cost, you must be obsessed with that ratio.

Taxis are obviously dreadful on that score, intentionally carrying only one or a few people at a time, which is why we don’t think of them as transit.  At the opposite extreme, a fully loaded rapid transit train may carry over 1000 passengers an hour with a single driver.  A bus on a highly performing line can hit 100 passengers per hour in a very dense market, while 30 passengers per hour is considered pretty good in most suburban contexts where demand is more sparse.

But if you do something different for every customer, as a fully flexible route does, you’re not going to carry more than 10 passengers per hour.  Physically, you just can’t, even if the demand is there.  Ten passengers per hour would mean that each passenger requires only six minutes of the driver’s time, counting the time to reach their location and (in some cases) assist them in boarding or alighting.  It also assumes that exactly ten people per hour would want such a service, when demand is obviously lower at some times.  That’s why most flexible service performs in single digits.

Flexible services can be reasonable transit investments because they can carry multiple passengers or parties at once.  However, flexible services are usually less effective than fixed routes, because they reach their capacity limits at such a low level, usually before 10 boardings per hour.

Flexible service can sometimes be the most productive option for a low-demand market, but in general, we make services more cost-effective by making them less flexible, and vice versa.

Paratransit services focused on the disabled have much lower performance (rarely even 3 passengers/hour) because they need the most flexiblity.  The customer may need an unpredictable amount of time to board and alight, for example, and pulling into a driveway invokes more schedule uncertainty than stopping on the street. 

A “flex route” for the general public will be more productive precisely by being less flexible than that.  Rather than pulling into your driveway, it may stop only on the street.  Rather than deviating anywhere in an area, it may go only on pre-approved optional routings, so you’ll have to walk to one of those.  Every time we reduce flexiblity in this way we increase a driver’s chances of serving more people per hour. 

Having said that, there are some very specialized cases where a flexible service will be more effective than a fixed route in a particular area.  Here’s a classic example:

The east-west magenta line is a straight fixed route, but there are two deep “pocket” neighborhoods whose street patterns are cul-de-sacs emerging only at this point.  In this case, we can cover both by saying that we’ll deviate into one or the other, but not both, based on customer requests.  Whoever requests the deviation first gets it.  As a result, the line ends up covering more of an area than the bus can actually cover on any single trip, which could result in slightly more passengers.

But only slightly.  Most commonly, what we achieve with flexibility is not better productivity (passengers per hour) but simply more coverage.  Remember, most transit agencies have a standard that says something like:

___% of our residents/jobs will be within __ distance of transit service.

This is called a coverage standard, and it is usually in tension with the goal of maximum ridership per hour, because it requires us to run into many areas despite relatively low ridership potential. Chapter 10 is all about this conflict and the real questions that must be asked.

Often, then, we may deploy flexible routes because they cover more area than we can actually cover on any one trip, and therefore help us satisfy a coverage standard.  This may have nothing to do with increasing ridership per hour. 

Assumptions and Distractions

The above argument is all geometry.  If you encounter data about a flexible service that seems to contradict these generalizations, check for the following:

• Differences in operating cost per hour of service.  Overall subsidy figures for flexible service may seem to tell a different story in cases where flexible service is cheaper to operate than fixed routes.  This can happen if flexible service falls outside of the purview of labor contracts, while fixed routes are firmly inside it.  If you can get much lower costs per hour to run flexible service (say, by contracting them out to a taxi company that has no union) you’ll get a better cost-effectiveness measured in dollars.  You can also get some operating cost savings simply from the smaller vehicles.  Neither of these issues, however, is an intrinsic feature of flexible routing.  Labor costs result from local labor conditions and union agreements, not routing style.  Smaller buses can be either fixed or flexible.  So these are different distinctions.
• Differences in fare.  If viewing through the lens of profitability or subsidy, you can obviously charge more for flexible service and thus make it perform better.  That’s a feature of fare that’s compensating for the intrinsic geometric limits of flexible service.  It doesn’t contradict the basic geometry.
• Parties travelling together.  Often, an entire flexible route will show a better productivity (passengers/revenue hour) because of groups of people travelling together, essentially consuming the same amount of the driver’s time as a single passenger.  The real test of flexible service, as of any transit, is how well it deals with customers travelling separately.
• Non-flexible elements. Many flexible routes are partly fixed.  For example, a bus may run along a fixed route for a while and then begin deviating in response to demand, as in the “two cul-de-sac” example above.  In these cases, of course, the fixed portion of the route may achieve higher productivity, so the flexible portion must be isolated to be assessed.

You can spare yourself a lot of confusion about flexible service by keeping in mind the physical facts of the matter:  Driving a special routing to respond to a customer request takes more of a driver’s time than picking up a customer along a fixed route.  Since we pay for service mostly in hours of labor, we have to care about how many passengers we’ll serve with each labor hour, so flexible service is intrinsically limited on that important score.  That’s why when flexible routes near their (very low) capacity limits, we usually try to turn them back into fixed routes.

So when it comes to the challenge of serving a low-density area like Sparseville, flexible routes may have a role, but they are simply a different way of serving a very low-ridership area, such as low-density with labyrinth street patterns.  In a few of these areas, a flexible route may deliver 6 boardings per hour while the fixed route is only carrying 5.  But meanwhile, Denseville is probably delivering 20-100 boardings per hour in its services — levels of ridership that are physically impossible for flex routes.  So flexible routes do not change the reality that low-density Sparseville will deliver fewer passengers/hour than Denseville.  Sparseville’s service must be justifed based on Coverage policies, not just ridership.

The last section of Chapter 1, “Personal Mobility: The Freedom to Move” should be understood as a humanistic argument, not a technical one.  My resistance to the word access, and my sense that we still need the word mobility, arise from their connotations, not just from technical meanings assigned to them. 

In any technical discourse — such as the language of an academic study, professional report, or legal document — you can define a word however you want as long as you state that definition.  If you then use the word consistently, you can communicate with others who (a) recognize the discourse as technical and (b) understand the rules of technical discourse, including your right to define a word in a specific way that excludes other connotations the word may have.   

Over time, certain meanings may come to be agreed upon within a technical discourse – such as academic conversations about sustainable transport or urbanism.  The definitions of mobility and access that I present in this section (mobility is how far you can go in a given time, access is what you can do in a given time) are pretty close to accepted at least among sustainability-oriented academics and theorists.  Again, Litman offers a good presentation of them.

Still:  A massive amount of the confusion in transit debates arises from technical discourse being heard by people who can’t be expected to know how the words are defined.  If the word in question has an emotive meaning, that will get in the way of understanding the technical meaning.  For example, as I explore in Chapter 3, the term captive rider is often used in technical discourse to mean a transit passenger who doesn’t have the option of driving.  Technically, you can define a word however you want for the purposes of an argument, but if you start saying “captive rider” to the public, well, it sounds like you’re thinking of these transit customers as prisoners, which is both false (many people without cars will forge other options if transit gets too awful) and risks stimulating lazy thinking even among some professionals (“those people are captives, we don’t have to care what they think”).

When you use a word with strong emotive connotations, like captive, inside a technical discourse, all may be well if you’re only talking to people who understand your technical meaning and know how to set aside emotive connotations.  But anyone hearing or reading your conversation is likely to hear the emotive connotations, and may well perceive them as louder and truer than the technical meaning.

I have this concern about the world mobility, which is the opposite of my concern about captive rider.  Mobility has intensely positive connotations because we also use the word to mean the body’s own degree of freedom – “ease of moving about” is one of the destinations I cited.  Access also has positive connotations but they are more abstract.  Because I want to connect with a broader public, I use the term personal mobility because it describes the sensation of being able to go places.  It refers, quite literally and obviously, to a freedom.  And we have to value freedom. 

—

My specific resistance to the word access arose out of conversations with streetcar advocates in which they insisted that the redevelopment benefits of streetcars – which would cause housing and destinations to be built closer together and thus reduce total travel demand – constitute an access improvement that compensated for the limitations that the mixed-traffic streetcar has in providing mobility – getting you where you where you’re going.  Considerable urban planning theory is advocating discarding the goal of mobility and replacing it with access.

There is no question that good urban redevelopment improves access  (by putting destinations closer together) and thus reduces the need for travel of any kind.  And there’s no question that this is an ideal outcome for the purposes of sustainability.

But putting access in conflict with mobility – understood as a freedom – creates several problems.

Many technical uses of these terms, including Litman’s, are talking about mobility and access as outputs, results of human behavior, and yes, if access is understood as “getting to something useful” while mobility just means “travelling a distance”, then mobility can turn into useless measures of sheer movement.  If I take the bus to a grocery store three miles from my house, and suddenly another store of the same chain opens a block from me, the transit system will lose a rider, less travel will occur, and yet everything is better from any sustainability perspective. 

But to most ears, mobility isn’t movement as an output.   It’s the sensation of feeling able to move.  To the ordinary ear the opposite of mobility isn’t access, it’s immobility, which means being trapped or locked in place.  Defining mobility as sheer movement is thus a very technical definition that’s likely to be misunderstood outside its technical context.  In particular, to people with an everyday concept of mobility, disparaging mobility can sound like disparaging freedom.

Second, of course, we have a long-term vs. short-term problem.  Redevelopment outcomes of a transit project are longer-term and proceed through several unreliable steps.   Mobility outcomes are immediate.  If you actually reduce mobility in order to build something that you think improves access, you’re impeding the ability of today’s customers (and voters) to get where they’re going.  This can happen, for example, in cases where a functioning transit network (perhaps run by buses) is made less functional by the demands of a new rail project.  Not all rail projects do this, but it happens.  It’s not wrong if everyone involved is aware of this impact, but that’s rarely the case.

Finally, of course, transit deserves to be understood in its own terms, in light of its own purposes.  Treating transit as though its only purpose is to stimulate redevelopment is like treating plumbing as though its only purpose is to sell real estate.  Plumbing has a more immediate purpose, which is to transport a range of liquids safely through a building, making them available as required.  Likewise, transit has an immediate purpose, which is provide personal mobility within a city.   From that purpose follows many benefits – social, environmental, and economic – but we have to respect that these benefits arise from transit doing its own job well.

Transit that doesn’t work in the short term is a big risk for the long term.  And in the short term, we have a city full of people who need to get places now.  These people value their freedom, not just the outputs of their behavior.  They can appreciate the WalkScore travel time map because it is a map of freedom.  We need to be able to talk about that.